The Ten Worst Academy Award Choices for Best Actor

The Academy Awards have degenerated through the process of bloated self-importance combined with increasing obsolescence to the point where the only real enjoyment in watching the actual Oscar broadcast anymore comes from complaining about how a particular person or movie could possibly have won. Part of the problem stems from the fact that very few movies made today are even deserving of a nomination-it's hard to imagine Chicago, A Beautiful Mind or Gladiator being in the running twenty or thirty years ago, much less winning, but then again Rocky and The Greatest Show on Earth are Best Picture winners, so who knows? Over the years, the Academy Award has been handed out to some brilliant performances by some of our most incredible male actors-Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull, F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus, and Frederic March in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde just to name a few. More often the Oscar for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role has gone to actors who were good, but not quite at their peak, such as Dustin Hoffman in Kramer v. Kramer (don't even get me started on Rain Man!), Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, or Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night. (More on Steiger, later.) But every once in a while the Oscar seems almost to deliberately deny the best performance of the year in favor of a significantly less impressive job of acting. And on occasion they actually hand out one of their bald-headed statuettes to an actor so undeserving it defies belief. Keeping that in mind, I present my choice for the Ten Worst Academy Award Choices for Best Actor. I gave myself only one hard and fast rule: The only performance that I will choose as the deserving winner will come from the other nominees. I mention this because, as we all know, many times the best performance of the year doesn't even warrant a nomination, but in order to keep things simple I enforced that rule upon myself.

10. Roberto Benigni. Life is Beautiful. 1998.